My wife had her DVR expander die a year or so ago. We bought a new one but I kept the old one thinking I might replace the drive and use it on my PC. However now I'm curious... If I replaced the drive would it still work on a TiVo? Not that I need more space with my 3TB pro coming, but still curious. Also if you replace the drive can it be bigger then 1TB and still work?

Hmm. I would bet if you replaced the Western Digital drive with another Western Digital drive it would work since the product code in the drive firmware would be accepted by the TiVo software. Regarding the capacity question, you could always try it and if it doesn't work return it?

Are you certain it is the drive that is bad? When my DVR Expander died, it was the electronics in the case that went bad. I put the drive in an external drive case and used it for an external PC drive.

When it died I remember going through the diagnostics on the TiVo, through some sort of kickstart code, and I think it reported SMART errors on the external drive. We replaced just the external drive and the TiVo functioned fine for another year.

I actually have another 500GB DVR expander that's fully functional that I'm not using either. It was connected to my old S3. But now that I have an Elite with 2TB I never have any space issues. (and I have a 3TB Roamio on the way)

Since they're just sitting around doing nothing I was curious if they could actually be used for anything fun.

The drive is what makes it an expander, not the case, more than a few TCF'ers swapped a "dead" expander drive into an Antec MX-1 case and the Tivo happily hummed along since the drive BIOS string makes it officially blessed, not the case.

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